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Recap: DemoCamp Edmonton 13

Scott Montgomerie showed us My Edmonton, an app he originally developed with a few other people at Edmonton’s first Startup Weekend. It started life as a real estate app, but evolved to be more of a local utility, with information on events, news, property info, and nearby services. My Edmonton is available both on the web and as an iPhone app. You can learn more at the blog.

Our second demo was from Yegor Jbanov, who showed us Deckle, an online print job automation tool. Targeted at the professional printing industry, Deckle integrates with Adobe Creative Suite and supports precision printing, such as for cheques which have strict requirements on layout and positioning. Yegor said that if you can do it with InDesign, you can pretty much do with with Deckle.

Mo Hamdan was up next, to show us Promptu Manager, a tool for managing fixed assets. Promptu is a Windows application, with a user interface very reminiscent of accounting packages such as Simply Accounting or Quick Books. Unfortunately the demo didn’t go as smoothly as Mo had hoped. It’s difficult to make a series of data entry screens interesting, I guess.

Our fourth demo was from Trevor MacDonald, who showed us Pluggin.it. The idea is to leverage your social network to help you sell stuff. Let’s say you have a car that you want to get rid of. You can offer a reward and then get your friends to “plug” your listing, and if their assistance leads to an eventual sale, they can claim part of the reward. Pluggin.it is in beta (they are having a launch party tonight) but looks pretty polished and definitely has some potential. You can learn more at Brittney’s blog.

Our final demo was from Andrew Czarnietzki, who works at 3DI (here’s a profile I did in 2009). He showed us a game he developed in his spare time that makes use of some of the interesting technology available to him at 3DI, such as pureLIGHT. It was really interesting in that it used “weird geography” and light as its unique features. When you fired your weapon, for instance, the light would bend around the geometrical shapes in the game. Looks like it would be a fun game to play on Xbox Live or something like that!

As a fan of open data and local apps, I really enjoyed My Edmonton. If you haven’t seen it before, check it out. I think Pluggin.it is a neat concept as well, and everyone really seemed to enjoy the demo. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of uptake it gets. My favorite demo was probably the game though – I love it when developers experiment with stuff just because they love it. Who knows, maybe one day Andrew’s game will be available on Xbox Live!